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The hotel room
The hotel room I’d arrived at Haldwani station in the middle of the night and saw that the town was shrouded in complete darkness due to a power cut. With some difficulty, I found someone who could guide me through the darkness to a nearby guesthouse, where I was offered this room. I still remember…
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The waiting room
The waiting room Despite the iron barred doors standing wide open, the ‘Welcome’ sign on the wall doesn’t exactly seem like an unnecessary gesture of encouragement for potential visitors crossing the threshold of this waiting room. The contrast between the space and the sign must have struck me as strangely amusing as I walked past…
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Where I stand
Where I stand After my comments in the previous posts on the Fall of man and Redemption of man, you may like to know where I stand. Well, I’m standing here under this tree and look up and think it’s beautiful. Through our observations of nature, and our thoughts and studies, we have come to…
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Redemption of man
Redemption of man or the cross in the mountains If God is in the details (“Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail”, Aby Warburg), then He is more present in the fly on the cross than in the man nailed to it. In any case, I have always admired the fly resting for a moment on…
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Fall of man
Fall of man Adam and Eve, driven out of paradise by an angry god. What had they done wrong? They had committed the first, original sin. They had eaten the fruit of ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’, which God had expressly forbidden. As a result, the first man and woman lost…
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Silent witnesses
Silent witnesses As I walked amongst the thousand-year-old Khmer monuments, with the guardian deities on the gopuras gazing out over the land in all four directions with their inward-turned faces, I could not help but see them as silent witnesses to the horrors that had ravaged Cambodia only a few decades ago. They had all…
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New life, new hope
New life, new hope What does the boy in the photograph see, what does he feel, and what associations does the image of the woman evoke in him? His apparently intense gaze and the way he is holding the woman by the arm suggest that she reminds him of his mother or another close relative.…
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Cambodia, and the trauma of a nation
Cambodia, and the trauma of a nation With the defeat of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge by the Vietnamese in 1979, the survivors of four years of terror were gradually able to rebuild their lives. As a quarter of the population had perished, almost every family had lost several loved ones. Some people were…
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Derailment of the mind
Derailment of the mind This is how I tend to look at people who are guided in their thinking and actions by extreme fanaticism. But one might as well say that the fanatic mind is not derailed; on the contrary, it perceives only one rail, only one track to a certain end which it follows…
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Killing Fields
Killing Fields Chamkar Krauch30 burial pits 450 bodies Me Chbar 1 prison burial pit 300 bodies Veal Batt Kanga rice field 500 bodies Tuol Roung Chrey 1 mass grave 400 bodies Banteay O Ta Krey 35 burial pits 4000 bodies Phlauv Meas30 burial pits 200-250 bodies Wat Samdech Muny 6 mass graves 5-6000 bodies Chumnik5-6…
καιρός remembered
… the right moment, position chosen, shoot …
